It’s been a while since I’ve posted about Taiji. In fact, I’ve been a bit slow updating my site. I’d considered before making this a monthly update and I think I’ll just run with it.
I’ve been progressing well in my Taiji study. I now know the long form, and I believe I mentioned what my unofficial rank is in a previous post. Now, the emphasis is on body movement quality and moving push hands. After doing so much stationary push hands, I’m struggling a bit to get my body to do the things I want it to do, that I know it should do.
I have two portable computers. One of them is used for work and the other is my personal netbook. I don’t really like using the integrated pointing devices and prefer using a mouse when possible, so it stands to reason that I have a need for a portable mouse. The problem is, finding a portable mouse that is actually portable seems a bit tough.
Have you ever paid attention to a function of your self or something around you that occurs without thinking or much effort? I did this recently with walking in the context of what I’ve been learning in Taiji.
In Taiji, stepping and walking isn’t allowed to be incidental. Each step is with purpose and with effort to do it right. Taiji walking should result in a great amount of balance while movement so that the walker can deal with an incoming force. It’s basically walking with intention.
I took a look at my regular walking, pay attention to how the body moves, and it really is a series of controlled falls and catches. One way to really demonstrate this is to step down a step, such as off of a curb or a set of stairs. The problem with this, though, is balance is barely achieved and there is no concept of a root. If you were to be surprise attacked with a push while walking, you could easily be pushed down.
Intent walking, though, particularly with Taiji walking, changes the rules a bit. The reason is with each step, balance is acquired before the next step is taken. Being pushed, it’s easy to regain or maintain balance.
Military style marching (including activities in marching band, etc) is another form of walking with intention, though it serves a bit of a different purpose. Still, it has an emphasis on balance by reducing the falling aspect.
I’ve been trying to blend Taiji walking into regular walking to see if I can make it look normal. I’m curious if it can reduce some of my stumbling (yeah, I can stumble over nothing at all).
Whenever I see news of some kind of technological advancement concerning netbooks, I always find at least a few people complaining about companies trying to expand the netbook name to devices that don’t meet the expectation. For example, Intel announced a dual core Atom CPU targeted at netbooks (there’s already dual core Atom CPUs, but they aren’t targeted at netbooks) that is due to be released sometime in the near future, and several responses indicated Intel was losing sight of what a netbook should be. This really bothers me because by these arguments, these people don’t want low power ultra portable sub-notebooks to advance and continue to carry the netbook name.
So I have to ask: Where is the line drawn between netbook and not a netbook?
